The GrOpener opens your beer with one hand, keeping the other free for...

There are a lot of ways to open a bottle of beer. There are keychains and iPod cases with bottle openers embedded in them. There are openers on flip-flops and baseball cap bills, wall-mounted openers, countertops, knives and even a beer bottle stick.

But a Denver photographer and part-time inventor, Mark Manger, says he's come up with a bottle opener that puts all of them to shame -- and with blinding speed.

See also: - Mark Manger is a frequent Westword contributor - Best Bottle Beer List -- 2012 -- Cheeky Monk - Check out bottle-cap artist Amanda Willshire's amazing studio and work

"The idea for this project was born in Ghana where I was teaching art with the Peace Corps," writes Manger (a frequent contributor to Westword) on the Indiegogo page where he is already close to raising $4,000 to get his invention into production.

"Every bar had these cool, hand-made openers consisting of a piece of wood with a couple of screws stuck in it. The screws hooked under the cap and the cap was pried off as you press down on the wood...it was brilliant!"

Over time, Manger came up with a different configuration for the one-handed opener "until the form and balance worked with the motion of the hand," he explains.

Manger has already paid for part of the construction of the GrOpener (it will be be built in Utah and finished in Colorado), which will retail for $25 each. He sought out the rest on the Indiegogo crowdfunding web site and got to that level in just a few days; if he exceeds that total, he can keep the money and use it to develop packaging and a web site -- and produce more GrOpeners.

And the GrOpener isn't Manger's first invention. In 2007, he designed and launched another product, the Zoot Snoot, a Neoprene device used by flash photographers. (It is available at adorama.com, lightwaredirect.com, and zootsnoot.com.)